Welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.

In the last episode, Beau Breslin and I imagined what might have happened, had Thomas Jefferson won his famous argument with James Madison — if every generation of Americans had claimed the right to draft its own constitution. Jefferson's argument was simple, and he stated it clearly: "The earth belongs to the living. The dead have neither powers nor rights over it."

Jefferson was, of course, talking about constitutions. But in light of the climate emergency we are facing today, those words take on a meaning that he could never have foreseen, a meaning that is no longer just a metaphor. The earth belongs to all life on the planet, not just to the small circle of men who treat it as something they control— something to be drilled, burned, extracted, and monetized, until there is nothing left to pass on to the next generation. 

We are living through the hottest decades in the recorded history of human civilization. The Earth is being pushed past its own limits, and we are breaking the planetary boundaries that have given rise to humanity. Consider what this single year alone, 2026, has seen so far.

Wildfires swept through Chile's Biobío and Ñuble regions in January, seventy-five separate fires burning at once under extreme heat and wind, killing at least twenty-one people and driving tens of thousands from their homes.

That same month, catastrophic flooding in Mozambique displaced hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed or damaged thirty thousand homes, downpours that scientists tell us have grown forty percent more intense since preindustrial times.

In late June, flash floods dropped more than ten inches of rain on parts of Kentucky in a single day, killing five people across Kentucky and Tennessee, one of them a mother who died rescuing her own son, and putting nine counties under states of emergency.

In July, France suffered its worst wildfires since 1949 — nearly three hundred thousand acres burned, while outside Madrid, sixty thousand people fled what officials called the worst fire in that region's history.

That same month, monsoon flooding in the Indian state of Assam killed eighty people and displaced two million more across two hundred villages.

All summer long, more than a hundred wildfires have burned across Canada, sending smoke five hundred miles south to turn the skies over New York City gray and the air acrid and unhealthy to breathe. 

Just two weeks ago, on August 11th, a rare derecho — a wall of straight-line wind more than a hundred miles per hour, moving with the force of a hurricane — tore from Chicago across Indiana, Ohio, and into Virginia, spawning tornadoes, killing three people, including a four-year-old child, and knocking out power to more than seven hundred thousand people.

Scientists studying the heatwaves that baked Europe and the eastern United States this year concluded they were "virtually impossible without climate change." The Climate Emergency is not a preview of the crisis. We are already in the crisis, and it will only get worse if our governments fail to act decisively. 

The science behind climate change has been settled for decades, despite the claims by Donald Trump that climate change is a hoax. ExxonMobil's own scientists, in internal reports written in the early 1980s, used the word "catastrophic" to describe what continued fossil fuel burning would do to this planet. Yet, it dissolved its own research team, buried the reports, and spent the next forty years bankrolling a campaign of denial — using the same playbook Big Tobacco used while its executives stood before Congress, under oath, and lied. That minority is now an existential threat to all life on this planet.

The question before us is not whether climate change is real. The question is why the most powerful nation on earth — a nation that calls itself a democracy — is constitutionally incapable of restraining the corruption and disinformation disseminated by a few extremely wealthy and powerful men.

In S3 E6 and 7, Camila Vergara gave us her diagnosis: systemic corruption. Not a few bad apples, but a rotten basket — a government that has drifted, decade after decade, into oligarchic democracy, where our elections have become a form of kabuki theater and our laws more often than not, serve to protect the interests of a wealthy few over the many. In the last episode, Beau Breslin showed us the other half of the problem: we are governed by an outdated and irrelevant 239-year-old constitution, written in secret by, endorsed by, only 39 white men, shielding themselves from the democratic spirit of their own revolution. It was a genuine counter-revolution, leaving us all with a document that included no functioning mechanism for the people to repair it, even when it endangers the very well-being of an entire planet.

So, how do we make sense of our national priorities, when our institutions of government seem to be taking a literal wrecking ball to the environment we depend on for everything we need and enjoy?  

It seems clear a political system built to resist the will of the majority, captured by the very interests it should be regulating, is now complicit in the greatest crime ever perpetrated against humanity. My guest calls out the people he sees as being responsible for that paralysis by name — the plutocrats, the petrostates, the pros, the propagandists, and the press. He counts roughly a dozen men — a self-interested minority of elites— whose wealth and media empires have not only poisoned the planet, but have poisoned the public mind against science itself. Michael Mann calls it a crime against the planet. Dr. Peter Carter calls it a crime against humanity. I might go further. This is system corruption and constitutional gridlock, leading us all with our eyes wide open, into an ecological holocaust — the knowing, documented, and deliberate destruction of the living world for the short-term profits of a tiny minority. And unlike the crises our framers faced in 1787, this one ends with an irreversible decline in the very systems we depend upon for life.

Michael Mann knows the inner workings of this systemic corruption better than most. He has been a target of a disinformation campaign lasting over twenty-five years. His famous "hockey stick" graph made the reality of human-caused warming impossible to ignore — and that made him a primary target of the disinformation campaign. When he was falsely accused of scientific fraud, he fought back through more than a decade of litigation and ultimately won a defamation verdict against his accusers. Michael Mann is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, and Penn's vice provost for climate science, policy, and action. His new book, written with the vaccine scientist Peter Hotez, is Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World.

In this episode, we talk about the forces undermining our political system, how they operate, what they already cost us — and what it would take for the living to reclaim not only their constitutions of government, but the earth itself.

This is my conversation with Michael Mann.  I hope you enjoy his insights, and if you find this conversation thought-provoking, please share it, subscribe, and leave a comment — it's how this peaceful "political" revolution begins.

Audio Link

YouTube

Articles

1. Chile wildfires — Biobío & Ñuble, late January 2026. 75 simultaneous fires, 21+ dead, tens of thousands evacuated, state of catastrophe declared. Source: WMO, "Extreme heat, cold, precipitation and fires mark the start of 2026."
2. Mozambique floods — late January 2026. ~650,000 people affected, ~30,000 homes destroyed or damaged, Maputo hit hard; World Weather Attribution: heavy downpours 40% more intense since preindustrial times. Source: WMO (same article).
3. Kentucky/Tennessee flash floods — June 27–29, 2026. 10+ inches of rain in one day, 5 dead, statewide emergency, nine counties in states of emergency. Source: ABC News.
4. France & Spain wildfires — July 2026. France: 115,000 hectares (~284,000 acres), worst since 1949. Madrid/Ávila region: 25,000 hectares, 60,000+ evacuated, "worst in history" for Madrid. Source: Greenpeace International, "Climate emergencies photos of 2026: Part II."
5. Assam, India monsoon floods — July 2026. 80 dead, 2 million displaced across 200 villages. Source: Greenpeace International (same article).
6. Canadian wildfires / New York smoke — July 2026. 100+ fires burning; smoke drove NYC/NJ air quality to "very unhealthy." Source: Greenpeace International (same article).
7. Midwest derecho — August 11, 2026. 100+ mph winds (99 mph at Gary, IN), tornadoes near Chicago and in Jennings Co., IN; 3 dead including a 4-year-old; 700,000+ without power; Dayton, OH broke a 111-year rainfall record. Sources: weather.com; NWS Chicago (weather.gov/lot).

Attribution line: European heatwave ~3.5°C hotter than 50 years ago; eastern-US June heat "virtually impossible without climate change." Source: Munich Re H1 2026 natural disaster review.

LINKS:
https://earth.org/un-confirms-hottest-decade-on-record-says-earth-is-being-pushed-beyond-its-limits/<

Hi, I'm John Mulkins. Welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.

When the National co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America talks about abolishing the Senate, a lot of Americans panic. It's hard for most of us to imagine living under a constitution other than the one we all know — even though our faith in government is at an all-time low. We are living in extraordinary times, and it's fair to say the framers of our 238-year-old Constitution had no idea what today's society would look like two remarkable centuries after they were all gone. Still, they understood, at least in principle, that our Constitution would need to evolve with our society, with technology, and with the challenges and discoveries they could never have imagined.

George Washington may have declared that "the basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government, when done as an explicit act of the people as a whole" — but he never explained how that could happen. Surely the framers were in no rush to make it obvious. They were still shaken from Shays' Rebellion, staring down the collapse of the Articles of Confederation, and they wanted stability more than they wanted democracy in 1787. So, they gathered themselves in Independence Hall, locked the doors and shuttered the windows, and in secret, sweltering in the heat, built a system designed to secure their role as political elites — one built to restrain the spirit of democracy the War of Independence had unleashed just eleven years earlier.

But Thomas Jefferson had his concerns. He argued that the earth belongs to the living, that no generation had the right to bind the next, and that constitutions should be rewritten every 19 years. But Americans have never grappled with the question of how to do that, let alone should they. Today, we'll have a look at what could have been had they taken Jefferson's advice.

Beau Breslin holds the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair in Government at Skidmore College, where he has served as Dean of Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs. He's the author of The Communitarian Constitution, From Words to Worlds, and his latest book, A Constitution For The Living, imagining how five different generations of Americans might have rewritten the nation's most fundamental law.

He'll walk us through those imaginary halls of history: the constitutional conventions that might have happened, the amendments that could have been written, and the fate of the Senate, which has outlived every challenge to its undemocratic authority...until 2022. 

It's a fun thought experiment, but a serious one, as it forces us to ask not just whether our political system is working, but whether Americans could ever create the tools we need to fix our Constitution when the Constitution itself becomes the problem.

This is my conversation with Beau Breslin. I hope you enjoy it. Please like and subscribe if you find this conversation thought-provoking! 

AUDIO PODCAST:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1861129/episodes/19623624

YOUTUBE:
https://youtu.be/4Q-kOrPGoe8

A Constitution For The Living
https://a.co/d/0bi5T1Fh

Article:
https://thepenngazette.com/constitution-revised/

The Earth Belongs to the Living
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-james-madison-17/

Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.

Today I will share part two of my conversation with Camila Vergara, political theorist and author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic. Camila is one of the leading theorists working today on what real, structural democratic renewal actually looks like.

In part one, we explored the theoretical backdrop, what she means when she says our democracies aren't merely corrupted by bad actors, but by genuine systemic corruption. In her view, most liberal democracies are built, structurally designed to protect the elites and a spreading international oligarchy. In this half, we get into the details of what real democratic resistance looks like and how Chileans took up the cause for democratic renewal.

Camila walks us through the ground-level story of Chile's 2019 uprising — how a few cents added to a subway fare and one tone-deaf comment from a government minister advising the people to just, "wake up an hour earlier to save money" lit a fuse that had been smoldering for decades. She describes the students jumping turnstiles in solidarity with their parents, transit stations burning under circumstances that were never fully investigated, curfews meant to prevent dissent, and the first government troops in the streets since Pinochet. If that sounds all too familiar, keep listening.  She explains how out of that chaos came something genuinely rare: a network of citizen assemblies sharing one goal, to write the world's most progressive constitution. This movement came from the ground up, and in her view, even though it was ultimately defeated by a structural push that undermined the popular will of the people, the example set by the Chilean people remains a hugely significant one, one for all nations suffering from a decline in democratic norms and system corruption.

From there we go further back, to the Marquis de Condorcet's 1793 constitution for revolutionary France, and his model of interlinked primary assemblies — a vision of direct democracy that never made it into what we now think of as the liberal democratic tradition. We'll discuss why the framers' fear of the "tyranny of the majority" doesn't actually hold up historically, and why energy cooperatives and neighborhood assemblies might matter more right now than at any other time in our history as a nation. That question, how close we are to a tipping point from oligarchy into outright tyranny, and what it would take to organize our way back out, is where Camila believes the United States stands today, and it should interest every American concerned about our future as a democracy.

It's a wide-ranging, sometimes sobering, but ultimately hopeful conversation about power — who holds it, and how ordinary people can actually take it back. Here's part two of my conversation with Camila Vergara. I begin by asking her how this movement began.

Welcome to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.

I want to begin today with a passage that has been sitting with me for some time. It comes from the Swiss scholar Pascal Lottaz, host of the Neutrality Studies podcast, in his March 2026 introduction to an interview with the political scientist Dr. Aaron Good. Lottaz opened that conversation this way. "Crime in the United States is not a bug; it's a feature. That actually explains a lot also about its illegal foreign policies. The US as a political entity is deeply intertwined with crime syndicates and explicitly illegal acts under international and local law. Epstein was not at all an exception. These shady dealers are part and parcel of how US politics works."

Good's argument, in brief, is this. After the Second World War, the United States built what he calls a "tripartite state" — the public democratic state we learn about in civics class, the national-security state of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, and, behind both of them, a deep state that he defines as an obscured, dominant, supranational source of antidemocratic power. That deep state, he argues, did not emerge from any constitutional design. It emerged from the pursuit of empire — from a postwar project that required, in his words, an endless exception to the rule of law in order to function.

That's quite a diagnosis. And it is a powerful one. But it leaves an obvious question hanging. If the rot is structural, what do we do about it? That question is what brings me to today's guest.

Dr. Camila Vergara is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Research and Innovation at the Essex Business School at the University of Essex. She is the editor of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, and the author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic, published by Princeton University Press.

Where Aaron Good gives us a forensic account of how the American state has been hollowed out by elite criminality, Camila Vergara takes a longer view. Drawing on Machiavelli, Condorcet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, she argues that the corruption we are describing is not a recent betrayal of an otherwise sound design — it is the predictable trajectory of representative government itself. Republics, she contends, decay into oligarchies. They always have. And the question is not whether the United States is corrupt, but whether the constitutional architecture we inherited contains the tools to push back against that decay — or whether we need to build new ones.

Her answer, of course, is the latter. She proposes what she calls plebeian institutions — a network of local assemblies, independent of parties and government, designed to give ordinary people a permanent, structural check on the power of the few.

Today, we are going to walk through that argument. We will talk about how she defines systemic corruption, why she thinks reform from within is unlikely to be enough, what plebeian power could actually look like in twenty-first century America, and whether the U.S. Constitution — as it stands — is part of the cure or part of the disease.

Dr. Camila Vergara, it is a pleasure to have you on the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Welcome to the conversation.

Quick Links

SYSTEM CORRUPTION by Camila Vergara
https://a.co/d/0eEmbDAF

Pascal Lottaz, Neutrality Studies:
https://youtu.be/WjgvH8xCbv4?si=gjQVXmbCbwhk3al1

YouTube:
https://youtu.be/0KUlGYE6apw

Welcome to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.

In this episode, I will be exploring one of the most important and timely questions facing our country today: What would it look like if Americans were to rethink the Constitution?

For a long time, the thought of holding a constitutional convention has been dismissed by most Americans, something debated by historians and legal scholars, perhaps, but rarely engaged in by ordinary citizens. Recently, that conversation has begun to emerge. Across the country, citizens are asking deeper questions about whether the political system we inherited is capable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century.

 Stephanie Lindquist serves as the Nickerson Dean and professor of law at Washington University School of Law.  She is also the founder of the Model Constitutional Convention.  In May 2026, in St. Louis, this groundbreaking initiative will bring together participants from more than 80 universities across the country. Modeled on the Article 5 process of the US Constitution, the convention is designed to simulate national deliberations over our most basic law.  

Beyond these deliberations, there is a growing national conversation concerning real-world constitutional reform.  Organizations like Unify USA, Braver Angels, Better Together America,  CELDF, Alliance for Democracy, Citizens Take Action, and many more are drafting their own amendments, forming their own citizen assemblies, and considering the possibility of calling for a popular national convention. 

Thomas Jefferson once suggested that each generation should have the opportunity to reconsider the constitutional framework under which it lives. If that is true, this moment may represent an opportunity, especially for younger generations, to help shape what comes next.  The Model Constitutional Convention is an attempt to explore these questions in a serious, thoughtful, and constructive way. In this conversation, Stephanie Lindquist explains how the project began, how delegates will develop their proposals, what kinds of ideas are emerging, and how everyday Americans can follow along.

Stefanie, it's a pleasure to have you on the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Welcome to the conversation.

When people talk about democracy in America, we often focus on elections… on candidates… on the latest headlines coming out of Washington.

But the deeper question—the one that shapes everything—is this: Who actually holds power in our society?

Is it the people? Is it our communities? Or is it wealth… concentrated power… and institutions that were never designed to answer to ordinary citizens? Today’s episode is all about movement building. Not the kind of movement-building calling for protests or boycotts. Not the kind of movement building that fades when yet another crisis emerges …But the kind of movement building that reshapes the legal and political foundations of our society.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, or CELDF, has been at the forefront of a remarkable experiment in democracy. An experiment that asks a simple but radical question: What if communities had the legal authority to defend their own environment… their own health… and their own future?

Ben Price serves as the National Education Director at CELDF, where he has spent more than two decades helping communities organize, learn, and take action. He has mentored local leaders across the country as they developed ordinances asserting community rights and the legal rights of ecosystems.

His book, How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property, examines how modern law has evolved to prioritize property and wealth over democracy and community self-government. The book earned the Independent Publishing Award’s Silver Medal in Finance, Investment, and Economics, and it has sparked important conversations about the relationship between law, economics, and democratic power.

What makes Ben’s work especially important for our conversation today is that he doesn’t just analyze problems. He works directly with communities trying to solve them. Communities asking: How do we organize? How do we build durable movements? How do ordinary people reclaim authority over decisions that affect their land, water, and future?

And perhaps most importantly, how do we build movements that are strong enough to challenge systems that have been in place for generations? These are exactly the kinds of questions we need to explore if we are serious about creating a more democratic constitutional order in America.

Constitutions don’t change simply because people write some ideas down on a piece of paper. They change when movements emerge that are powerful enough to demand something better for everyone. Ben Price has spent years helping communities wrestle with the practical realities of movement building—what works, what doesn’t, and what it really takes to transform political power from the ground up.

Today, we’re going to talk about organizing… democracy… and the long road toward structural change. Ben, welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.

LINKS:

https://celdf.org/

https://celdf.org/resources/multimedia/

https://celdf.org/resources/blog/

https://celdf.substack.com/

S3 E3 Confronting the Climate Emergency with Dr. Peter Carter

remix 7/20/2026

Welcome to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.

Constitutional scholars, including UC Berkeley Dean of Law Erwin Chemerinsky, Sanford Levinson, and George Van Cleve, and many others, have been calling for constitutional reform for a long time. They say we will not solve the climate emergency until we repair or even replace our outdated and now dangerous Constitution. Climate scientists, even more so than most political scientists, understand our climate is in serious trouble. Yet they are struggling for solutions. They know our governments are failing to address the growing threat of the gathering climate emergency. Johan Rockstrom, Michael Mann, David Suzuki, and James Hansen foresee a pretty grim future for humanity. The chronology of climate-related "unnatural disasters"  is rapidly escalating. Unprecedented Crime, by Dr. Peter Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth, is a rich, legally grounded indictment of our government's failure to act. Peter is concerned, and like many, getting more concerned every day. I want to understand his frustration over the failure of government to respond to this unprecedented crime, and to discuss his thoughts on game changers for survival. 

Confronting the Climate Emergency with Dr. Peter Carter takes listeners deep into the link between ecological collapse and political malfeasance. From David Suzuki’s call for a climate revolution to COP 30 in Brazil, people are struggling for answers. This episode asks the hardest question of all: can we confront the climate emergency before it is too late? Dr. Carter and I explore the crime scene, the power of citizen action, the technologies shaping our future, and the likely necessity of constitutional reform in this episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Because democracy, like all living things, must evolve or perish.

I hope you get a lot out of this episode. Please leave your comments below, and if you enjoy this presentation, please like, share, and subscribe.

Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.

Today, I will be talking with Sanford Levinson. Levinson is the W. St John Garwood and W St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law. He teaches Law at both Harvard and the University of Texas Law School in Austin. Sanford is the author of over 450 articles and book reviews, and seven books, including Our Undemocratic Constitution, Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance, and Democracy and Dysfunction. Sanford is an early proponent of replacing our Constitution with a more democratic one, and for several good reasons; he knows more about our outdated and increasingly dangerous Constitution than almost anyone in America. I first interviewed Sanford in May of 2022, at which time he offered to come back to talk about his experience with the Democracy Journal project to draft a new model constitution for the United States. 

Levinson chaired the project, calling upon several prominent legal scholars to contribute to the contents and style of this ambitious document. My hope is that this conversation might shed some light on the process and pitfalls of constitution-making in America, as we uncover some of the challenges even the best of planners have encountered. You may not know that in 2020, the National Constitution Center had also commissioned the drafting of three new models, each reflecting the values and goals of three very different worldviews. Specifically, these models were designed to reflect a Progressive, Libertarian, and Conservative worldview.  None of these models got much attention. In Sandford's own words, they just fell flat. Apparently, the American public had no interest, and the media graciously obliged by ignoring the whole thing. Was it the process, the results, or American hubris that led to the failure to engage the American psyche in the deliberations, or was there a deeper, and even more concerning problem? 

I began our conversation by asking Sanford why no one had simply proposed to draft a more democratic model. 

Outro

Persuading the people that a convention is thinkable should be easy in a democracy. After all, that's what democracies are based on. I can think of a lot of things that are more unthinkable than a convention, like what our world will look like in a post-3-degree world. Tune in next time for a heated discussion about the failure of government to confront the Climate Emergency, with Dr Peter Carter, climate scientist and founder of the Climate Emergency Institute. This conversation is about to heat up!

Welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. I’ve been on a kind of sabbatical this past year. So much has happened, and I really needed to take the time to explore some of the major developments which, in several important ways, relate directly to the issue of our Constitution.

The first was the issue of UAP disclosure. In a stunning announcement, members of Congress revealed that UAPs have most certainly been retrieved and reverse-engineered by our own government—in secret, with the cooperation of a handful of very significant, and very private aerospace corporations. This revelation is profoundly significant, especially as it relates to government transparency and public accountability.

Emerging from that conversation was a broader discussion about the nature of reality itself. It turns out that what we call “reality” is not as concrete as we once believed. Quantum entanglement, quantum fields, gravitic propulsion, consciousness, telepathy—all these topics have profound implications for humanity, which led me to reflect on the kind of society we are, and the kind of society we might become as we enter the 21st century.

Our current systems—economic, political, and ecological—are literally collapsing before our eyes. We are entering a profound transformation. As futurist Peter Leyden has often stated, we are in a period of system collapse which will give birth to entirely new systems—ones that could enable us all to create a better world. What and how these next systems arise, requires us to understand something about the nature of change. That is why I thought it would be a good time to talk to Ben Manski.

Ben studies the participation of ordinary people in the deliberate constitution of their societies. His work encompasses social movements, law, politics, climate and ecology, technology, and corporations, focusing on democracy, constitutionalism, and system change.  Manski  practiced public interest law for 8 years and managed national nonprofit organizations, direct action campaigns, and political campaigns, and parties for 25 years. Dr. Manski is an assistant professor of public sociology and director of Next System Studies involving research into the relationships between, systemic crisis, system design, social movements, and American constitutionalism.

https://libertytreefoundation.org/
https://www.benmanski.com/
https://nextsystem.gmu.edu/about
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1362848/full

Welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America Podcast

The Anthropocene will be a doozy from what I'm hearing. Even if new technologies and new systems replace the ones currently falling apart, it will be a bumpy ride. It looks as if severe climate-related events will be occurring much more frequently. Monthly events could turn into weekly events, until eventually, those might even become daily events somewhere in the world.

Megatrends appear to be rather obvious at first glance. Autocracies are on the rise. Democracies are being tested. There is a genuine contest of political systems being played out on the global stage, Freedom is being contested. Is it even necessary? So how much better than being at the mercy of a tyrant or a mere autocrat? Maybe not, at least that's how it all appears to be going.

Russia remains a shining example of what can go wrong in a constitutional democracy. After all, reforms were once a thing in Russia, political lines were actually shifting for a brief moment in time. But then Putin rose to power, with imperialist ambitions, and a desire for supreme power and wealth. Corruption is not foreign to the former USSR. It runs rampant, and the concentration of wealth in Russia today is as bad if not worse as in the US.

Inequality remains a serious problem in the world, regardless of the political system. For the vast majority of human beings, daily life is a struggle, while a small if not tiny fraction of society remains engorged on the fat of excess of wealth and power, mobility, and security.

Alexander joined the Department of International Relations at Central European University in 2022. He previously taught at the European University Institute at Florence (2013-2022), the University of Cambridge (2004-2013), and the European University at St Petersburg (1999-2004). His current interests are the political aspects of the Anthropocene, global decarbonization, and security in Eastern Europe. A Fellow of King’s College Cambridge, Etkind was the Leader of Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, a European research project (2010-13). He is the author of Eros of the Impossible. The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Westview Press 1996); Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Polity Press 2011); Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford University Press 2013); Roads not Taken. An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt. (Pittsburgh University Press 2017); and Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press 2021). Alexander coedited Remembering Katyn (Polity 2012), Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave 2013), and Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia (Routledge 2017). His new book, Russia Against Modernity, was released by Polity in April 2023.